Give us SIGNIFICANCE (3.8.11)

It turns out I anticipated the move Dr. Howard would be making in the “Significance” chapter of his book in my February 22^nd post, which investigated the concept of belonging in the success of online communities or social networks. I guess I’m a genius. Or, perhaps, this is simply a reflection of how closely related the two concepts are. Either way, it sounds like an idea worth some dedicated time and blog-space.

So, what does it mean for an online community to have significance?

According to Dr. Howard, significance is about generating a “network or community’s gravitas, brand, and reputation” (168), which is to say that significance is about attracting people for reasons that extend beyond remuneration. This is how what Dr. Howard calls “the paradox of exclusivity” applies to significance:  people will value a community more if they are one of an elite group of members. That doesn’t mean that the community is unpopular, simply that it is hard to gain membership. That makes the members feel better about being members and makes community membership much more attractive and desirable to people on the outside. Dr. Howard calls this a paradox because it tends to be a community designer’s first instinct, and most obvious desire, to attract the multitudes. It is a tricky numbers game, to be sure, but exclusivity can lend a community significance and, as I suggested before, make members feel a deeper sense of belonging. In other words, tricky or not, it’s worth it. And it works. Barak Obama’s online community designers engineered his online campaign around a certain level of exclusivity. Members gained desirable information early, making that information proprietary and those members privileged. And now he’s president.

Facebook did something similar in is earliest manifestations. Only students from a select number of universities could have a Facebook profile. There weren’t, as a result, the multitude of members then that there are today. However, there were quality members, and the multitudes noticed and wanted in – and that’s serious significance. Dr. Howard calls the “quality” side of membership “social capital” (171). Communities that can generate the right kind of social capital can make their communities more significant to members and non-members alike. Like Facebook, once the network or community is popular enough, its managers can choose to open the doors to a less specific (and perhaps less elite) crowd. Facebook is amongst the most successful social networks ever created because of that initial exclusivity and resulting significance. Had its makers opened it up initially to any and every one, chances are that a few students from hundreds of schools might have made profiles. Instead, Facebook remained restricted and got the attention of every student from every university in the country and much of the world. Like I said, it’s a tricky numbers game, but numbers Facebook’s are pretty convincing.

Once you’ve decided what kind of crowd you want to acquire for your community, Dr. Howard notes that the next step is to determine how you should attract them. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Tipping Pointi, provides three different types of conversation starters that community / network builders should be on the lookout for if they want the word to really spread:

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           - Connectors:  people who have an abnormally large number of connections

-               - Mavens:  experts in a particular subject (specifically experts who enjoy talking about that subject)

-               - Salesmen:  people who sell ideas (big surprise); people who spread information and convince others to act on that      information

These individuals, collectively known as the “nodes” of a given network or, more generally, “influentials,” are the initial target for community builders. Dr. Howard explains that there are a variety of ways to contact these people – by invitation or by offering an open-access community – and a number of ways to keep those people interested. This means that you need “influentials” to lend your community or network significance, but you also need to make the “influentials’” experiences significant as well. Dr. Howard offers a variety of suggestions from acknowledging members’ accomplishments to celebrating celebrities to offering members a story which translates a shared vision (I won’t list them all here to avoid redundancy).

The point is, what we create should be quality; it should deserve quality membership and positive attention. It is worth the effort to find the people who can connect you to the community you want to attract. In other words, when we design communities we have to do it with a specific set of community members in mind. And that community can’t be “everyone.” If we don’t go into a design project deliberately with our own set of very specific goals in terms of membership, then chances are people won’t deliberately seek out our community and scrabble for that membership once it becomes available on the web.